Obama ‘worst threat since World War II,’ Dewhurst says

U.S. Senate candidate David Dewhurst probably didn’t need a press release to communicate his nose-thumbing disdain for President Obama’s visit to Austin and San Antonio this week, but a press release we got nonetheless.

“President Obama is using Texas as an ATM, the same way he’s using taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to spend our country into oblivion,” the lieutenant governor proclaims, before delivering himself of a jeremiad worthy of talk-show ranter Michael Savage. His upstart rival, former Texas solicitor general Ted Cruz, routinely describes the president as “the most radical president in American history,” but Dewhurst ramps up the screed. “President Obama,” he asserts, “is the most serious threat to America since World War II.” (Worse, apparently, than Cold War nuclear threats, Al Qaeda attacks, the heartbreak of psoriasis)

Our national fate, Dewhurst warns, is a dismal Obama-led Continental tour: “Through his disastrous and reckless policies like Obamacare, it seems Obama is trying to mirror America in the image of Europe. If we do not change the path we’re on, Obama will kill our economy, spend America into bankruptcy and relegate us to a failed future.”

The relatively low-key lieutenant governor, who has fallen behind the energetic and hyper-articulate Cruz in recent polls, calls for “a complete transformation of how our government works” and “leaders who will get government out of the way and allow the private sector to flourish.”

He’s waited 66 years for his Mr. Dewhurst-goes- to-Washington-moment, and now, even if he gets by the pesky Cruz, he may find the Capitol crumbled, thanks to “the most serious threat. . . ” Like Charlton Heston’s Statue of Liberty moment in “The Planet of the Apes,” all he’ll be able to do is shake his head at the folly of his fellow Americans, take one last look at the fallen dome and then trudge on back to Texas. It’s that bad, folks.

Or so says an over-heated candidate in the home stretch of a long, bitter race.